Instagram offers companies incredible opportunities to get in front of potential customers to generate sales.

According to a recent report, 75% of Instagram users consistently take actions such as visiting business websites or purchasing a product.

If you haven’t already started creating and optimizing your Instagram and strategy for sales on Instagram, you’re most likely missing a huge opportunity.

Want to learn more?

Here are 4 tips to help you learn how to sell on Instagram

Optimizing your Instagram profile:

Your business’s Instagram profile can become a portal for increasing sales because people turn to Instagram to search for brands.

A business’s Instagram profile should include:

Profile photo: choose a photo that makes your business easily identifiable (such as a business logo).
Well-crafted biography: the Instagram profile bio is incredibly important. It should include a clear description of your business and tell potential customers exactly what your business has to offer.
Link to business website: the URL section of the bio is the only link that can be attached to an Instagram profile. This link is great for generating traffic and we recommend using a unique address for this section.

Your business’s Instagram profile is often the first point of contact a customer may have with your brand, so it’s important to make a great impression and get people to follow your business.

By creating a consistent brand story and aesthetic, you can turn potential customers into devoted followers.

How to sell using Instagram Ads to target potential customers?

Algorithms used by social media platforms are constantly changing and competition is increasing, so it’s important to know and use what works.

At the moment, Instagram Ads is a very powerful tool to generate sales.

Once you set up your business’s Instagram profile, you can decide how much you want to spend, where you want your ads to be displayed, and how long you want them to run on Instagram.

Also, running your own ad campaign on Instagram is not such a difficult thing.

We also recommend you to read our article: “How much does it cost to promote on Instagram?” and you’ll find out what the major types of ads you can run on Instagram are, how much it will cost you to run ads on Instagram, how to collaborate with influencers and what costs you can expect.

How to sell with Instagram Stories:

Stories on Instagram will continue to be useful in the long run because they offer the perfect opportunity for businesses to interact with potential customers in a more personal way.

Instagram Stories gives users with at least 10,000 followers the ability to add links that can help you generate sales, as well as build an email marketing list or generate free traffic to your business’s website.

If your Instagram profile doesn’t have 10,000 followers yet, you have the following options:

Collaborate with influencers who have over 10,000 followers to promote your business and Instagram profile.
Share Instagram Stories on your profile to promote a specific product by mentioning in a text on the story the following message: “Link in Bio”.
Invite the current story audience to DM (private) you to receive the link to the product promoted in the story.

All of these tactics are great for getting customers to interact with your brand and ensuring you stay relevant with your target audience.

Shoppable Instagram Feed:

The Instagram shopping feature allows businesses to tag products available for sale and allows Instagram users to purchase directly from the app.

Instagram is the perfect place to promote a sale, launch a new product or a discount code exclusively to followers.

If you use Instagram’s Shopping feature only to promote discounted products, you can use your brand’s other social media accounts to drive traffic to your Instagram profile.

While these 4 tips may seem pretty basic to you, implementing them correctly will help your business increase its sales numbers because you’ll take the guesswork out of your business’s online marketing process.

Post engaging content for your business

After identifying the niche your business is in and setting up your Instagram for Business account, comes the fun part of creating engaging and interactive content for your feed.

The question is how do you get people to stop scrolling and interact with your post? How do you stand out among the hundreds of companies competing for people’s attention scrolling posts? The answer is pretty simple: consistency and quality.

The content you post forms the basis of your brand identity. Stand out visually, try to provide a distinctive aesthetic to your feed to make it stand out.

Consistently producing high quality content helps to attract audiences, get potential customers and then turn them into loyal customers.

If you want to find out how to sell more, follow these helpful tips for building a successful Instagram profile:

Please stick to a certain theme/aesthetic: Instagram is a visual platform. Unique and eye-catching elements outshine others and are more effective in attracting audiences to your company’s Instagram profile. Plan ahead for details like tone, font, style, etc. Photo editing apps like Adobe Lightroom and Canva can help keep visual consistency in your feed. In addition, you could also use apps like Later and Plann to organize your feed.

Experiment with IG’s creative tools: the sky’s the limit when it comes to experimenting with posts.
Make the most of IG apps like Boomerang, Layout, Hyperlapse, etc. to fill your feed with variety. Even a carousel can be used to post a mix of videos and photos together in one post.

Post quality photos and videos: when it comes to “what not to do” when uploading content to Instagram, inappropriate photos are totally out of the question.

Always upload content that reflects your brand’s message and never post blurry, poor quality images. Take the time to edit your images, set the lighting correctly and make sure the product you want to promote becomes the hero of your image. It is also beneficial to post images that show your audience using and interacting with the product you are selling.

Prop up games and contests: predictability is boring; both in real life and on Instagram. Improve your content by launching quizzes, polls, small contests with prizes, etc. Follower engagement will skyrocket if you keep your audience engaged: many love guessing what you’ll post next.

Effectively use hashtags to increase your brand awareness

Even with great content, your posts won’t be seen by many people if they aren’t supported by the right hashtags. You need to perceive hashtags as connecting points between your content and the audience that is searching for it.

Hashtags are a great discovery tool and act as a bridge between your business and brand awareness.

Here’s how you can optimize any post on Instagram using hashtags:

Create a branded hashtag. A hashtag of your own helps reinforce your brand identity in the customer’s mind.

Use a combination of high and low hashtags to cover all levels. This way, you’ll be able to target customers at all stages of the sales funnel.

Be smart with hashtags. Use them sparingly. If five hashtags can do a good job, there’s no point cramming all thirty possible ones into your post. You need to know how to sell more, using Instagram effectively, without excess.

Uses only relevant hashtags. No need to add lots of hashtags just because they are trending.

Use hashtag tracking tools such as Hashtracking, Brand 24, etc. to monitor your hashtag performance.

Evaluate the hashtag tactics used by your competitors to gain visibility. See what works for them and what you can do to improve your own posts.

If it seems complicated to find the right hashtags, don’t despair, because there are generators like Tag Blender, All Hashtags, etc. that give you a hand in finding trending tags in your niche.

That said, agency re7consulting offers social media marketing services for businesses that want to sell more with Instagram.

So, feel free to contact us to discuss your business and how we can help you increase your sales.